‘The Walking Dead’ Season 7, Episode 13: Morgan Takes a Turn

Season 7, Episode 13: ‘Bury Me Here’

“This is it, Morgan. You have to kill, or else you might as well just kill yourself.”

If you say so, Richard, but I don’t think you’re going to like how that turns out.

After several weeks in which the Alexandrians tried to organize an alliance to battle the Savior Axis of Evil and Bad Mustaches, “The Walking Dead” spent Sunday with the Kingdom, the most significant holdout. That status will probably change after the colony’s two major losses — one tragic, one perhaps overdue.

The latter was Richard, who judging from his shock and struggle as Morgan choked him to death, was envisioning a different sort of victim when he gave the advice above. But that’s par for the course for a man who rivals Bond villains in his knack for pointlessly complex schemes with nearly zero chance of success.

This one involved a cantaloupe, a bunch of shopping carts and a suicide-by-Savior death wish. (See also: the plan a few weeks ago to turn Ezekiel against the Saviors by tricking them, in unwieldy fashion, into killing Carol.)

This latest inane plot did work, in a way ... although it also doomed young Benjamin, as well as (eventually) Richard. Benjamin’s death deeply wounded Ezekiel, who finally seems ready to join the fight against the Saviors.

It also woke up Morgan’s demons over the loss of his son, Duane. (He even referred to Benjamin as Duane at one point.) This in turn inspired Morgan to come clean with Carol, telling her about Glenn and Abraham, which, coupled with Benjamin’s death, convinced her to rejoin the fight.

By episode’s end, the Kingdom’s path to war was clear and Carol and Morgan had switched places, with her relocating inside the walls and him to the recovery cabin, where he will either emotionally convalesce or revert to his walker-eradicating “clear” mode from earlier seasons. Possibly both.

Benjamin’s death was telegraphed in the early moments of the episode, which he spent sharing warm moments with his brother, Henry, giving Morgan a painting, pining over a girl and otherwise seeming, in his tender kindness and hopes for the future, not long for this world. He asked Carol to teach him how to kill walkers, offering to skip the produce delivery in order to take a lesson. “No, do your drop,” Carol responded, at which point I jotted “BENJ IS DOOMED” in my notes.

Richard, meanwhile, signaled his own plans (and, inadvertently, his fate) by making amends and settling his emotional accounts. “Sorry for how things have been between you and me,” he told Morgan. “I know you’re a good man.”

But “a day’s coming when you can’t be that good,” he added. “When that happens, don’t beat yourself up about it.” (Noted.)

Soon the convoy arrived at Richard’s roadblock. Richard hid the melon (we learned later) and Benjamin got shot in the leg by the rat-faced Jared over the shortfall. The choice of target surprised both Richard and Gavin, who ordered the punishment — each clearly thought Richard would be the one to go down.

And he would go down soon, of course — after Benjamin bled out, after Morgan raged over his death and stumbled onto the missing fruit in the process, and after Richard confessed to the plan. “We can use what’s happened,” he told Morgan and then outlined yet another scheme, this one to win back the Savior trust, then crush them. True to precedent, it didn’t work out as he expected.

As I watched all of the above, I came to a parallel conclusion: Richard wasn’t the only one unfurling dubious plots on Sunday.

The lunacy of Richard’s scheme, along with the number of things that had to break just so — in order for Benjamin to get shot, so that Ezekiel would change his mind, for Morgan to come unglued, so he could bring Carol on board, and also get his stick back so he could kill Richard, and so on — eventually unsuspended my disbelief. Morgan’s motives for killing Richard may be explained later, but the rest of the Kingdom’s just letting him do it seemed beyond the pale. (Update: Upon further review, it is clear Gavin ordered the other Kingdom soldiers to stay out of it.) After several solid episodes in a row, Sunday’s was the first of this back half to try my patience.

That said, it was bracing to see Crazy Morgan again. You’ll recall that Morgan helped Rick in the earliest days of the show and disappeared until Season 3, when Rick, Michonne and Carl discovered him homicidal and demented following the death of his son. (The boy was murdered by his walker mother, whom Morgan had been unable to kill for sentimental reasons.) Morgan returned in Season 5 as a bo-wielding Jedi who serenely refused to kill others, a way of life he learned from Eastman. Even after he learned about Glenn and Abraham, he continued to favor a nonviolent solution.

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A scene from “The Walking Dead.”CreditGene Page/AMC

Benjamin’s death changed that. The actor Lennie James is a maestro of anguish, giving it many shades and otherwise revealing on Sunday that Morgan’s hold on his sanity is more tenuous than it seemed. In this context, his rigid and often frustrating commitment to pacifism becomes more plausible — less a narcissistic moral code than an emotional tool for keeping it all together.

On a show largely about loss, Morgan embodies the constant struggle not to let it consume you. He’s an example of both how mind-warping grief can be overcome and how it can return unexpectedly, the road to recovery being more crooked than most would prefer.

Some never get there. Richard’s devastation over the deaths of his wife and daughter — that backpack was heartbreaking — and his self-blame over “doing nothing” led him to repeatedly do things that were actually worse than nothing, as he tried to make up for past failures instead of dealing with his pain and moving forward. As with the contrast between Rick’s nobler impulses and Rosita’s revenge quest, “The Walking Dead” suggests that rash action driven by personal pain is doomed to failure and unconsidered consequences.

There were signs of a method to Morgan’s madness. Though probably fueled by a combination of rage over Benjamin and some unresolved issues, his murder of Richard reset the table for Rick’s more deliberate Savior plan. And he absolutely knew what he was doing in telling Carol about the murders of Glenn and Abraham.

But it perhaps bodes well that Carol took time first to replant the symbolic Humanity Garden with Ezekiel and Henry. The cantaloupes that led to Sunday’s misery had been infested and left in ruin. “Here’s the beautiful thing, your majesty,” the woman named Nabilah told Ezekiel earlier in the episode. “You can burn it and throw it all away, but if you want, it can all grow back.”

As allegorical lines go, it was pretty on-the-nose. It also wasn’t wrong.

A Few Thoughts While We Learn Nothing

• I know we’re anti-revenge lately, but man does that Jared have a gruesome end coming to him.

• “I didn’t go this route for stress,” Gavin the Savior middle manager said. “No, just the opposite.” The implication — that an average guy is willing to go along with cruelty in order to make things easy for himself — offered a quick glimpse at the banality of Savior evil.

• Why do you think Morgan killed Richard? Are you happy to see Carol ready to take care of business again? What’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever done with a melon? (Insert your own Gallagher joke here.) Please share your thoughts in the comments.